BAGnewsNotes

Your Turn: The Artful President

The best analysis of this image on the White House Flickr stream, if you can call it that, was "man in a bubble."

Doesn't this photo, taken of the Obama family at the Pompidou Museum (and currently sitting atop the Flickr site), though, have a good deal to say about the Administration's perception/projection of itself as modern, curious, aesthetic, intellectual, contemplative, familial and, yes, visual?

(image: Pete Souza/White House. Paris. June 6, 2006. WH Flickr stream)

The Woman Who Saved Baseball

More great visual pitching from the White House for Sonia Sotomayor (new pics being released day-by-day):

She's the woman who saved baseball, and what's more all-American than that? (Not to say Red Sox fans might take exception to certain allegiances.) But then, the most telling element here? No, not the Tigers logo on top of the dugout. It's the little blue-and-white alert sign (who said Rush Limbaugh?) opposite the nephews.

(11: 25 am PST - slightly edited)

(image: Sotomayor family via The White House via AP. caption: This undated handout photo provided by the White House shows Sonia Sotomayor with her nephews Conner and Corey Sotomayor at Yankee Stadium in New York. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice David Souter)

Sonia: An Eye for Others

It's a beautiful photo released by the White House of young Sonia Sotomayor with her sister and cousins, which is that much more interesting for the angle.

Besides adding mortar to the warm and richly personal portrayal (and marketing) of Sotomayor, the photo reinforces the ethnic dimension of the nomination, the image suggesting an old LIFE Magazine story on Hispanic life in America.

What is also a subtle endorsement (and reflective of her personality, from what I've read) is the way Sotomayor's focus -- at the expense of the attention -- is on the other children.

(photo: Sotomayor family via White House, May 26, 2009)

The Exemplary Celina Sotomayor

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First, Team Obama caught the media and right-wing mostly off-guard Tuesday morning coming out of the three-day weekend, allowing them to establish critical momentum with the Sotomayor nomination.  

Second, they caused the Repubs pause by putting forth not just a highly-qualified and mostly non-controversial candidate, but also a Latina, representing a constituency the Michael Steele and Co. can ill afford to further alienate.

Third, they signaled that the campaign to move Sonia Sotomayor through the nomination process will be heavily built (as well it should) on the strength of a very powerful life story. (Sound familiar?) Using the White House Flickr stream, which is emerging as a highly strategic publicity asset in threading a more intimate and freewheeling pictorial narrative around the more staid and filtered visual news stream, you can see Team Obama already laying down the narrative on day one.

If you closely follow their Flickr stream, you might appreciate that the White House -- in contrast to standard newswire practice -- is quite informal and subjective in regards to what or how many details (especially names) they provide in a caption. In this case, the accompanying text reads as follows:

President Barack Obama greets the family members of Appeals Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, including her mother Celina Sotomayor (smiling), prior to an announcement in the East Room of the White House, May 26, 2009.

Echoing the photo from the announcement ceremony posted two images before, it's no surprise that Celina is more a focus here than Sonia: The joy elevates the courageous and exemplary single mother as much as it does the American dream.

(Pete Souza/White House. May 26, 2009. White House Flickr Photostream)

Pink skivvies: Whitewashing The Afghan Campaign

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"Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage ... I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban. Just imagine seeing that: a guy in pink boxers and flip-flops has you in his cross-hairs. What an incredible innovation in psychological warfare."

--Defense Secretary Gates   

So this May 11 image of Spc. Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas, fighting the Taliban in his pink "I love NY" boxer shorts, has "gone iconic."
Lauded by Secretary Gates himself, I don't think I could provide an analysis any better than Daryl Lang's at the Photo District News blog:

Chillin' (Post-Pirates, Pre-"Prom") At The White House

Here's pirate-defying hero Capt. Phillips and his wife at the White House this morning (large size; mind-blowing size), with my distillation of the comments from the WH photo stream:

>>Wow! Imagine those 2 people from Vermont sitting in the Whitehouse next to our Presdent. He is so compassionate, and real and they get to be that close.

>>They came to The White House looking like that? Wow!

>>Maybe, with this president, you don't have to dress to kill.

>>I suspect his people told them that the dress code on Saturday's is business casual. In addition, There are many great Americans who don't necessarily have a $500 suit and Johnson & Murphy shoes.

>>Who cares how they dressed - they are real/everyday people from Vermont. Yes - it is a privelage for them to meet the President, but the President should feel the same about meeting this Captain.

>>I love the casual and familiar vibe happening in this photo. It speaks a lot about our president.

About Time

Smart move by Team Obama to set up a photo op with Franken in the White House.

On the one hand, with the trappings and the visibility comes the message, it's time to put this guy in the Senate. Simultaneously, however, capturing only the most glancing view of Franken's face also keeps to the message/strategy that Franken is still under the radar, being patient, letting the process play out.

(7:40 am PST - slightly edited)

(image: Pete Souza/White House. Getty caption: In this handout provide by the White House, Vice President Joe Biden (R) meets with Al Franken in the Vice President's West Wing office of the White House May 6, 2009 in Washington, DC. Franken met with Biden to discuss the contested Minnesota Senate race, of which Franken was declared the Democratic winner, but the outcome of which is being appealed by his opponent, the Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.)

The Executive Picnic Table

The president’s comments came at the end of a weeklong balancing act in which his public words and actions were carefully measured to summon a sense of urgency without setting off a panic. It was no coincidence, his aides said, that he played golf the day his administration declared a national emergency. -- from: President Enlists Cabinet to Prepare for a Pandemic (5/2/09 NYT)

The line above, pulled out of a NYT article yesterday on pandemic preparedness, is interesting in the way it speaks to White House communications strategy. The quote, I believe, also informs this photo of Clinton and Obama meeting last month on the South Lawn.   

In contrast to the uncharacteristic photo on Friday showing a nervous White House auto task force behind the President, this image -- stopping short of describing life as a picnic -- is classic for the way it trumpets the message: we're loose and operating in an atmosphere of calm.

(image: Pete Souza/White House, April 9, 2009, from the "Delivering on Change" photo set released on the White House flickr photostream to mark Obama's 100 days in office)

USA! USA!

He's a national hero at a time when our country really needs one. -- Neighbor of Capt. Phillips on CBS News

I've got some questions about the Maersk hostage story, especially in regards to this photo.

What I'm wondering, in particular, is whether the story closed out with more of a Bush era, terror war, "us versus them," jingoistic feel to it. In other words, with all the deep and less tractable problems the U.S. is weighed down with -- such as the the brutal recession, the near-collapse of the banking system, and the FUBAR situation in Afghanistan -- was the media, the public and the White House all too compelled to "go nationalistic" over this dramatic ending; play up an almost Hollywood association to pirates; seeing this as a symbolic victory; and heavily personalizing a problem that has proved mostly an international one -- and one not so political, at that.

Or, is what we're seeing in the photo above a brilliant inversion of the Cheney/Bush/Rove visual narrative in which, all of a sudden, a center-left America (the photo, beyond stars-and-stripes, promoting a more rainbow-looking coalition) can deliver the appropriate will, strength and resolve in the face of a threat ("Yes We Can, Mateys") with the Democratic President scoring "conservative points" for approving a winning commando mission?

(image: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Image. caption: Crew members of the US merchant ship Maersk Alabama gather around a US flag while celebrating that the captain of their ship, Richard Phillips, which had been held captive by the pirates had been freed on April 12, 2009. Somali pirates tried to seize the ship early on April 8, while it was in the Indian Ocean about 500 kilometres (310 miles) off the Somali coast. CNN television, citing a senior US official, reported that three of the four pirates holding Phillips had been killed, and the fourth pirate was in custody.)

Richard Holbrooke? I Was Thinking John Wayne.

“You have a problem that is larger than life,” said Christopher R. Hill, a longtime colleague expected to be named as the new ambassador to Iraq. “To deal with it you need someone who’s larger than life.” -- from: Back on World Stage, a Larger-Than-Life Holbrooke (NYT)

This morning's NYT piece by Jodi Kantor features this image of new envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke. The photo was taken in 2006 and has got to be the companion to another picture she references:

Stashed in a drawer in his Manhattan apartment between snapshots of family vacations, a photograph shows Richard C. Holbrooke on a private visit to Afghanistan in 2006. He is mugging atop an abandoned Russian tank, flashing a sardonic V-for-victory sign and his best Nixon-style grin. The pose is a little like Mr. Holbrooke himself: looming, theatrical, passionate, indignant.

The Nixon analogy unleashed some unusual associations of my own. Besides Holbrooke's wife framed between his legs (reminding me a bit of Katie Couric), I imagined Castro, and then Ahmadinejad (with the beard and sunglasses) also underfoot. (Now, what to make of the Russian tank?)

Given the scope of our Afghanistan and Pakistan problems, I hope Hill is right and this visual characterization of RH as the über
diplomat and Obama-era rock star equates to that much more leverage.

(image: Richard Holbrooke. caption: In a familiar scene, Richard Holbrooke stood on a tank in Herat, Afghanistan, in 2006 above his wife, Kati Marton.)